Adaptation & Evolution
Plain Text For Authors & Writers
Rise of the Machines
I wrote this opinion piece for the New York Times in the fall of 2008. Since then I’ve become addicted to financial crisis entertainment and parables of the second gilded age: books, movies, documentaries, Matt Taibi in The Rolling Stone, and the incomparable Gretchen Morgenson in the New York Times […]
Congress Shall Make No Law . . .
Law students spend the better part of three years beetling their brows over the study of constitutional law—a mercurial, opaque, highly theoretical system of textual exegesis, which nobody but the tenured and long-winded professor pretends to understand. And the capsheaf of con-law contwistification is First Amendment law. The First Amendment […]
Lego Antikythera Mechanism
The Antikythera Mechanism is the oldest known scientific computer, built in Greece at around 100 BCE. Lost for 2000 years, it was recovered from a shipwreck in 1901. But not until a century later was its purpose understood: an astronomical clock that determines the positions of celestial bodies with extraordinary […]
Blue Streak: Swearing, Free Speech & Sexual Harassment
The Wall Street Journal invited Richard Dooling to write its Millennial Essay on Swearing, One Thousand Years of Searing: From Swearing By To Swearing At. Writing in the New York Times, Richard Bernstein called Blue Streak “a charmingly impudent essay on language and sexual politics . . . less an […]
Critical Care: Revisited
The Meaning Of Life Is That It Stops Richard Dooling on NPR’s Talk of the Nation discussing his opinion piece in the New York Times, “Heath Care’s Generation Gap.“ It was my first novel, and I wrote it almost two decades ago, but I doubt I’d change a word of […]
Writer Uninterrupted
If Microsoft’s EULA Applied To Books
Rapture For The Geeks
Survival Of The Smartest: Will Geeks Inherit The Earth? Purchase From Amazon. Media Coverage of Rapture For The Geeks: Sunday New York Times Op-Ed, “The Rise of the Machines,” by Richard Dooling. Jeremy Lott reviews Rapture For The Geeks at Ars Technica. The Wall Street Journal Digital Network. The New […]
Mothers Against World Of Warcraft
graphics by kevin ryan (kryan at dday dot com) Mothers Against World of Warcraft (Excerpted from Rapture For The Geeks, by Richard Dooling.) Let’s say that the Singularity is really coming, and let’s say it’s powered by Moore’s Law and Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns. Call the Technological Singularity a […]
Rejection, Thy Constant Companion
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm. –Winston Churchill Most writers worry about rejection, not acceptance. Ray Bradbury says that the successful writer has to deal with both: “You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.” Several articles […]
Creighton University Disinvites Anne Lamott
Back in early 2007, Creighton University invited author Anne Lamott to speak at the school and exacerbated an ongoing spat with the Omaha Archdiocese, which was unhappy to learn that Lamott supposedly supported assisted suicide. Creighton University officials said they invited Anne Lamott to speak before her book Grace (Eventually): […]
The Wizard Drops the Curtain – New York Times
I attended Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting and wrote about it for The New York Times Op-Ed page: THE Berkshire Hathaway Corporation held its annual shareholders meeting here last weekend, drawing a record 27,000 capitalist faithful from all over the world to worship at the Qwest Center in downtown Omaha. Onstage, […]
On Publishing
On Writing Aspiring writers often seek advice about how to find a publisher or a literary agent. Unfortunately, most authors don’t know much about the book business, unless they happen to live and work in the New York publishing world. Jane Friedman I once featured links to various sites about […]
How To Query A Literary Agent
Ye Olde Query Letter I loathe writing. On the other hand I’m a great believer in money. –S.J. Perelman Many large publishing houses accept only manuscripts submitted by agents. Many agents aren’t interested in representing unpublished authors. So now what? If you are an unpublished novelist, don’t bother a literary […]